COMMUNITY projects
community arts:
culture with purpose
Throughout my career I have always put the community experience at the forefront of my work.
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Making art that involves other people, and helping them to access their innate creativity, is central to the programmes I have managed.
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Over the last eight years, I have been involved with projects at all levels, from bid writing and project managing through to front of house and making cups of tea.
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In 2018-19 I sat on the National Executive Committee of the Artists Union of England, helping to make nationally important decisions on behalf of socially-engaged freelance artists across the country.
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Below is a summary of some of my most recent projects. To find out more about my services and CV, send me an email.
With support from National Lottery Heritage Fund and Friends of Friendless Churches, I was commissioned to produce a recreation of a badly dilapidated 15th century Doom painting. Using hand-made medieval paints and brushes, I embarked on a research programme, drawing on academics, journals, and photographs of other Dooms to produce my recreation.
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From April 2024 this will hang permanenty in St Mary's Church, Woodham Ferrers.
doom painting recreation
Commission piece and creative workshops
ST MARY'S CHURCH, WOODHAM FERRERS | EARLY 2024
In collaboration with Unpuzzled Theatre CIC, I wrote a successful funding bid which allowed us to create a 30-minute long play about Southend's Prittlewell Prince - the Anglo-Saxon royal buried in Southend with early Christian artefacts in his grave - and shared this story with over 400 local residents across 5 days in August 2023. This play was accompanied by a 30-minute interactive visual arts session looking at Anglo-Saxon history.
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You can see a full recorded version of the play here.
a knight at the museum
collaboration with unpuzzled theatre
SOUTHEND CENTRAL MUSEUM | AUGUST 2023 | ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND
purta fleot
researching the ancent history of purfleet-on-thames
HIGH HOUSE | JAN-JUNE 2023 | CREATIVE ESTUARY & THURROCK COUNCIL
Working with Purfleet Primary Academy, High House Community Group, Purfleet Youth Club and the Purfleet-on-Thames Community Hub, I researched, taught and made art about the area's ancient origins. This included finding out about the Purfleet Interglacial Period - a period of archaeo-geological time named after the area - through to archaeologists finding a mammoth and an elephant buried on top of each other, separated by around 50,000 years. ​
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From this research and the designs of the groups I work with, I painted three, 4-metre long silk flags alongside Sarah Doyle of Kinetika.
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These were exhibited at Colourscape in July 2023, and are now permanently housed at Purfleet Military and Heritage Centre and Purfleet Primary Academy.
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Alongside Kent University academic and writer Jeremy Scott, I look at the origins - mostly Anglo-Saxon - of place names in and around Southend-on-Sea. Alongside broad research into the history of migration movements into the British Isles, I used these Anglo-Saxon place names as an entry point into a public discussion around perceptions of what it means to be British and English, as well as opinions on migration.
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To facilitate this conversation, I made some graphic artworks which were presented on large aluminium boards as well as postcards, depicting places around Southend as they might have been 1000-2000 years ago, with their name written in Old English (and in one case Norse) in Runes, in an homage to seaside town postcards. Jeremy took the research I did alongside research into local folk tales and turned these into new poems, fictions and prose, telling new stories about settlers, explorers, invaders and migrants to the area, as well as personal memories, about Southend.
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We presented this work alongside a questionnaire which included a quiz about British history and qualitative questions about perceptions around Britishness, to the public of Southend in September 2022. Over 100 people answered our questionnaire and we found that there was a low level of knowledge amongst the general public about ancient historical migrations into Britain from other parts of the world, as well as about the gerneral timeline of events on this island before 1066.
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More about this project can be found here.
migration, place names and identity
researching the origins of place names in southend alongside british values
SOUTHEND-ON-SEA / MARCH-SEPTEMBER 2022 | CREATIVE ESTUARY
These projects are the latest in eight years of community arts and heritage project work that has included working with, among others, Studio 3 Arts, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Metal Culture, Southend Museums, Havering Mind, Barking and Dagenham Young Carers, Kent University, Thurrock Art Trail, and Creative Blast.
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If you've got a project and want to enquire about my services and skills, get in touch.
